40 years later this is still making news..how sad  

I've read about this case and I've seen movies about Charlie Manson. I really feel for those who have no idea what happend to their family members. People who for years have wondered where they were, or if they were dead, where the bodies are. It's sad, and it's heartbreaking. Hopefully at some point many people will begin to feel closure.
The scary thing is the Manson "family" still having paorle hearings, that to me is terrifying.

Well, it is expensive to kill someone. Difficult legalities. Nasty to think they can be paroled. Scary really. At least these stories will put a negative spin on the parole hearings -- because the Family should have spilled the beans about these gravesites if they had really been rehabilitated.

Charles Manson, there's a scary name from American folklore. More graves? How tragic. It would be nice to say that this surprises me, but the depravity of humankind becomes less likely to surprise me as time goes by.

I have heard, in the past, that one of the hardest things is not knowing what happened to your loved one. I have empathy towards the families of these victims.

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I believe, but I cannot prove, that it is more expensive to kill a man than to lock him up for life. It seems that there should be a different burden of proof to use when taking a man's life than when locking him up. In Manson's case, there is a difference in that the orchestrated or ordered the deaths. I don't think it was proved that he did the killing himself.

As my research shows, Manson's death sentence for the conspiracy to commit murder charges was reduced to live imprisonment when California temporarily eliminated the death sentence. When reinstated, it did not, apparently, return Manson to death's row. To that end, the answer to your question is: "Manson is alive because of a legal glitch."